beef

The Beefcake Virtualization lifecycle manager

A simple VM lifecycle manager for macOS and Linux.

• macOS: Uses vfkit with the Virtualization.framework
• Linux: Uses QEMU with KVM

About

beef adds some syntactic sugar on top of managing VM lifecycles:

1. run, start, stop, rm, status, ls, get and set commands
2. cloning and extending source raw image files
3. state saving for re-launching an existing VM by name
4. abstraction of complex arguments required for configuring VMs
5. abstraction of running Linux and macOS VMs

Image Format

beef supports raw disk images only (.raw, .img). QCOW2, VMDK, and other formats are not supported.

You can convert other formats to raw using qemu-img:

qemu-img convert -f qcow2 -O raw input.qcow2 output.raw

Setup

macOS

Install vfkit from https://github.com/crc-org/vfkit or using whatever method you prefer

Linux

Filesystem Requirements: Linux requires a filesystem that supports reflink cloning (copy-on-write). Supported filesystems:

• btrfs (native support)
• xfs (requires mkfs.xfs -m reflink=1 when formatting)

Ubuntu/Debian

# Install packages
sudo apt install qemu-system-x86 libvirt-daemon-system ovmf genisoimage

# For ARM systems, use qemu-system-arm instead:
# sudo apt install qemu-system-arm libvirt-daemon-system ovmf genisoimage

# Configure qemu-bridge-helper
echo "allow virbr0" | sudo tee /etc/qemu/bridge.conf
sudo chmod u+s /usr/lib/qemu/qemu-bridge-helper

Fedora/RHEL

# Install packages
sudo dnf install qemu-system-x86 libvirt-daemon edk2-ovmf genisoimage

# For ARM systems, use qemu-system-aarch64 instead:
# sudo dnf install qemu-system-aarch64 libvirt-daemon edk2-ovmf genisoimage

# Enable and start libvirt networking
sudo systemctl enable --now libvirtd
sudo virsh net-start default
sudo virsh net-autostart default

# Configure qemu-bridge-helper
echo "allow virbr0" | sudo tee /etc/qemu/bridge.conf
sudo chmod u+s /usr/libexec/qemu-bridge-helper

Note: The chmod u+s command sets the setuid bit on qemu-bridge-helper, which is required for unprivileged bridge networking. This is a standard configuration for QEMU bridge networking.

Example use

Running a Linux VM

This example works on both macOS and Linux hosts.

$ curl -LO https://download.fedoraproject.org/pub/fedora/linux/releases/42/Cloud/aarch64/images/Fedora-Cloud-Base-AmazonEC2-42-1.1.aarch64.raw.xz
$ unxz -T0 Fedora-Cloud-Base-AmazonEC2-42-1.1.aarch64.raw.xz
$ beef run fedora42 Fedora-Cloud-Base-AmazonEC2-42-1.1.aarch64.raw
{
    "state": "Running",
    "ipAddress": "192.168.64.56",
    "pid": 96456
}

Running a macOS VM

This example is macOS host only.

This example assumes that you have a VM.bundle. This can be created using https://github.com/Code-Hex/vz/tree/main/example/macOS.

Note: macOS VMs require running with --gui, if omitted, it is implicitly assumed.

$ beef run --gui -- macos VM.bundle